And what do you think is a widely respected wording towards a customer query?

If the customer complaint had been bogus, it would have been a perfectly valid and actually refreshing response. However, the complainer did have a point. Therefore, the response was atrocious.

For those wondering what this post is regarding, see this thread:
A dodgy experience with InsuredPlay? http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...dplay-1265609/

I would also read this post: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...l#post35571018

Perhaps they are just outliers, however I'd still like to know about them before I signed up.

Since we are not on a Turkish market and the site depends on customers to actually make profit, I would not necessarily say it is a refreshing response in any way to increase your reputation.

i dont understand all teh bitching here. they saw a niche and created this product and so far i see nothing shady.

obv everybody has to decide for himself if he wants to pay some money to take a decent amount of variance out of teh game. geez some guys even run that bad that tis service is most likely +EV for them.

WOW! Then it is even worse than I had calculated!

A break-even 100NL FR grinder can easily play 250k hands a month. In order to earn 50k VPPs each month, he would need to play approx 250k hands (@0.2VPP/hand.) (I play in excess of 250k hands/month for the record.)

Playing, say, 266k hands a month would yield approx $5k in profit (rakeback.) If he was foolish to use this service of yours, he would have to pay $1,000 EVERY MONTH!! That is nothing short of a complete rip-off!

Such a player would typically experience swings of approx twice that in a single month (i.e. he would usually run somewhere between $2k over and $2k under EV) and this is relatively minor compared with the cost of the service. By the end of the year, he would have paid $12,000 in insurance fees- and this would induce a far stronger tilt than any tilt he's likely to experience due to EV downswings.

You are missing the point when you say "So for a NL100 player to pay $500 in fees per month, he has to play... ...133K hands per month [which] is a lot." Yes, it's a lot BUT for people playing less volume, obviously their fees would be less, but they would be proportionally higher and even more of a joke.

No competent, poker player would ever choose to use this service. Unfortunately there are many number-illiterate players out there (fish) who may be gullible enough to be drawn in.

I TimStone, you know that, and I agree that it's a great idea on paper, but the cost just makes it a bad option for players.

You play approx 100k hands a month of NL200-1000, at an average buy-in of "NL300" I would guess. (Rough numbers.) Would you be happy to pay $1,125 per month ($13,500 of your yearly salary) to know your variance will be reduced?

Listen buddy you want to take my quote out of context by leaving out the most important part, at least be right about it. IF the customer had not had a valid concern and was indeed trying to just angleshoot then the customer service response was both REFRESHING and ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE.

We have 5 Supernova Elite users actively using InsuredPlay.

You might be under estimating the size of possible downswings. There are players who run $10K below EV playing NL100 in less than 100K hands.

Besides, insurance will give a lot of players a mental edge. Because more or less everyone tilts. Not worrying about bad beats and/or downswings might in fact increase your winrate more than the insurance fee reduces it.

Bad beats and downswings are the reason we keep a bankroll. Insurance will reduce bankroll requirements, allow you to play at higher stakes, gain more player points/rake back and pay less rake.

So even if you're right about the size of downswings, there are still arguments for using insurance. Hence, the not so fish players using our service.

I can assure you that the +winrate player percentage is a lot higher than the industry average among our players.

fees are still ridiculous.

I've played over 12 million hands. I have a pretty good idea.

Firstly, the tense of your statement is wrong. You are implying that certain people have a tendency to run badly- this is incorrect of course, although giving that impression is helpful to promote your service.

The correct thing to say would be that "players have run $10K below EV playing NL100 in less than 100K hands before." With the millions of players out there, this is undoubtedly correct, just as it's correct to say "There are people who have won the lottery more than once." In reality, for someone to run 100 buy-ins below EV in less than 100k hands would be very, very, rare."

This would all be correct and accurate if the cost of the insurance was minimal, which it isn't.

This comment is a little vague, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Regardless, as an experienced professional and a competent mathematician, my opinion is that this service should be avoided by players for the reasons I have given.

He's trying to say that it's not bad players only that take the service, there's also good players and overall, people that pick this service are above the 50% of avg player mark, which is of course a bad arguement because in order to know and use the service, you have to care about poker which means you are probably at already at least close to the 50% mark.

Also showing that good players use the service doesnt make this less-of-a-ripoff it just goes to show that even good poker players makes stupid financial decision. Not a brand news imo.

Also the edge of the best-possible rate of the service (not even mentionning the worse rates, which are probably the most used) isnt really that far from the casino edge at the blackjack tables.

yes but if a person has a truly winning game, this eliminates variance that would otherwise destroy a good player who is just running unlucky...plus it allows people to play massively underrolled...provided they truly are beating the game and the rake in all other respects. This is a wonderful service, and it makes sense that SNE's would be using it. Sure it is slightly -EV but a small price to pay to eliminate variance. I wish I had thought up this business and funded it.

1. It doesn't eliminate variance. There is plenty of variance other than that associated with all-in situations.

2. Whereas it would typically affect a player's game, It's an exaggeration to suppose bad variance would "destroy a good player."

3. It doesn't allow players to play massively under-rolledl. Players can, and do, go on massive downswings even when they run above EV.

4. It makes no sense at all for a SNE to use this service. The cost of the service over the course of the year would far out-weigh any downswing. As a SSFR SNE player myself, I typically see swings of ~40 buy-ins above/below EV, yet the service would cost me over 10 buy-ins a month! If I wanted, I could take, say, 50 buy-ins (the cost of using the service for 5 months) and stick it in a bank account (or under the bed.) Then, at the end of each month, I could add/subject from my poker account balance using those funds to align with the correct EV (the same job that insuredplay provides.) I could also pay the $1k that I've saved from not using the service that month into my "reserve" account. After 5 months or so, I would likely have enough in my reserve account to be able to replace my initial 50 buy-in balance back into my poker account. At the end of the year I will have received the same benefits of using insuredplay yet I will have saved myself $12,000. And that's just an example for a 100NL player playing around 60% SNE volume. (It would be approx $20,000 for SNE volume.) Someone reaching SNE through playing 200NL would be paying around $24,000 a year- 20% of SNE value!! (That assumes a rate of 0.32vpp/hand. If it were 0.40vpp/hand then the yearly cost would be around $19,000.)

5. It's not slightly -EV, and it's not a small price to pay.

I agree that its rip off.

I understand that programming the website and a working system costs money as well as advertisement.

However 10% "fee" is just ridicolous. That is not insurance but an obvious rip off!

Youre also guilty of false advertising because this heavy fee you charge increaes variance significantly by lowering your winrate. It might lower your standard deviation but im not sure if that counts as lowering variance if you loose a ton more money by doing so!

This service would be interesting especially for pros if the fee was 1 or 2% with no kind of magical extra " fee " .

I've played only 6 figures of hands of poker. You've played 8 figures. Plus your logic is solid. Best point you made was that all-in EV's are only one factor to luck...you could get coolered all day and run above EV and still lose tons...like getting oversetted an inordinate amount of times and spiking your 1 outer twice as often as you usually should.

obv i would not use it bc for me it's throwing money out of teh window... teh months i ran under EV in teh last 4 years i can count on one hand...

anyways for some guys tis service is not a bad idea, even if it obv is not cheap...

if you have a ****ty mindset a downswing can **** up ur game entirely and some people just run bad for very very long time...

it's clear that it would be better and prolly cheaper to work on the mindset instead but if you want to have a quick solution, boom, insured play...


in teh end they are a company who wants to make money and it's up to everybody himself if he wants to use the service or no...

Every player starts with 0.25% fee. Which is not difficult to maintain. The fees go up to maximum 1.49%.

Why do people like to be staked? same concept. I think the product is fine if people want to use it and for a fee, any winning player can have steady income based on the hours they put in.

12 million hands is a lot from one player but for a company like us it is not. So we have a pretty good idea too.

That is the point I'm trying to make it is not as rare as you think.

We're offering the best possible price in our capacity. What is your point of comparison here? What is the minimal cost? This is very subjective.

The benefits would be different for every player. While you can find the price too high, another player might think it's worth the price.

About 25% of variance might be due to all-in situations. The number might be as high as 50% for some players depending on playing style.

http://blog.insuredplay.com/?p=211

What I'm saying is the percentage of winning players is higher among the players on InsuredPlay than the rest of the online poker world. So our players are not just fish as you're trying to put it. In fact just the opposite.

One of our SNE players allowed us to write a blog post about him. You can read his point of view here: http://blog.insuredplay.com/?p=262

The money you put to the side can save you against downswings of proportionate size. If you put aside $12K that will save you against a 12K downswing. If you pay us 12K in insurance fees, that will save you against $200K worth of downswings.

This is the same reason why a rich company/person buys insurance despite having enough funds to cover all the worst case scenarios.

The other reason is that idle money loses value, i.e. money has marginal value. When you keep putting aside money to cover your downswings, you are effectively taking out money from your bankroll that would normally go to the tables. Money put on the table generates winnings -especially given than you're an SNE.

In the example on your website, KK is all-in with equity of 80% and AQ has 20%.

4 times out of 5, KK wins the $100 pot. Each of those 4 times, you are deducting KK's account by $20. The 5th time, KK does NOT win the $100 pot. That time, you are adding $80 to KK's account. My question for you is, what if the AQ has insuredplay? For the first 4 hands that AQ loses, would you add $20 to AQ's account, but then when the AQ hits on the 5th hand would you then subtract $80 from their account? In other words, do you have to be the favorite in a hand to be insured or can you have it as underdog, too?

Yes your example is correct. It works both ways. By default, we cover 1% to 99% all-in equity. Using the settings, you can adjust the interval of equity that you want to insure.

I know you're being sarcastic, but to the extent your heater is a result of sucking out when all-in and you should have lost...time and time again...yeah the insurance is going to eat up all your profit you would have made. But it does bring you closer to your true winrate minus a fraction of a percent. That is beyond a doubt. How much closer is debatable.

It is not the same as why a rich company/person buys insurance. People take out insurance against events that will (in the long-term, with a large enough "sample") cost them money. i.e. Someone could take out insurance against getting injured and not being able to work- thereby enabling themselves to receive insurance money should they get injured. So there will be plenty of examples where people "run below EV" and get injured and miss work. However it's impossible for someone to "run above EV" in this situation- the collective group of people getting insured WILL "run below EV." With regards to poker players though, the collective group WILL NOT run below EV. They will run at EV. Hence at the exorbitant prices that you charge, a player could, and should, "self-insure" himself instead if he wanted to apply such a system. (It would be a little silly for someone to actually do this, but it's a better option than using insuredplay.)


^All of the above are simply comments to the remarks that I have made. You can't defend against what I'm saying because there really is no justifying the service at these costs. I already read the SNE blog post. It made me laugh.

I think one statement that sums up the true cost pretty well is the one that follows. (These are from the rough calculations I made in the last post, so if you disagree with the cost, please feel free to post how much you think it would cost.)

In order to make SNE, a small stakes player using this service would have to pay out approx $24,000* over the course of the year in fees, which is 20% of the $120,000 SNE value.

(More casual players have to pay a rate up to 6 times as much as the SNE player in the example above!)

*playing at 200NL. At 100NL, earning approx 0.20 vpp/hand, then the cost would be $18,750. Playing higher than 200NL, the cost would be even more.

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For the record, I would recommend using a service such as this if the cost was around 10% of the current lowest priced fee.